MARSHALL, Minn.—At a campaign stop in this southwestern Minnesota city, Sen. Norm Coleman was introduced to three local College Republicans who asked him to stand for a picture. As they posed, Coleman reached over and ripped off each young man’s paper nametag.

“We know each other now,” the Republican said.

For Coleman, politics is about finding shared self-interest. “I’ve known a lot of friends here for a lot of years,” he said earlier the same day, stumping at a tool and equipment store in Willmar.

Through hard work, people skills and verbal savvy, the former government lawyer and urban mayor has shown a skill for mapping out common ground—sometimes with allies, sometimes with foes but most important with potential voters.

Coleman, the older brother who helped take care of five younger sisters, calls it a lifelong impulse toward pragmatism. “I’m relationship-oriented, and I think that helps you achieve what you want to achieve,” he said.

Coleman’s critics, and he has plenty after mixing in the highest circles of state government and Minnesota politics for three decades, think it’s more like opportunism.

“His actions were so often based on what was good for him politically,” said Jay Benanav, a former St. Paul City Council member who clashed with Coleman when Coleman was mayor. “I think he always had that in mind.”

Now, with his political survival at stake in a tough contest with Democrat Al Franken, Coleman’s ability to win friends and influence voters is getting the latest test in a career that’s seen wins and losses. In a tough year for Republicans, Coleman is emphasizing his problem-solver side even as Democrats continually remind voters of one Coleman partnership he’s not emphasizing lately—the one with President Bush.

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Even Coleman’s admirers marvel at the personal distance he’s traveled in his adult life. At Hofstra University on Long Island in the late ’60s, the now-59-year-old Brooklyn native was a long-haired campus radical who led protests against the Vietnam War and traveled with friends to Woodstock.

“Norm was not forging partnerships back then,” said Norm Kent, a college friend and attorney in Florida who now differs with Coleman politically, but still considers him a friend. “He was the leader of the left who was antagonizing the right.”

But even then, Kent recalled, Coleman had a talent for rallying people behind a cause. “Norm was always charismatic, he was always ambitious and he was always ahead of the curve,” Kent said.

After college, Coleman worked and started attending law school at night in Brooklyn. A full scholarship lured him to the University of Iowa Law School, and in 1976 he landed in the Minnesota attorney general’s office. He worked there the next 17 years while starting a family with wife Laurie. They have a son, Jacob, and a daughter, Sarah.

Coleman rose to the job of solicitor general, and made a name trying big cases and leading legal reform initiatives. He learned to navigate bureaucracies and touch all the bases.

“Norman draws people to him very naturally,” said John Apitz, a fellow lawyer in the AG’s office who led Coleman’s transition team after he was elected St. Paul mayor in 1993. “He has this natural ability to coalesce people toward a singular vision of things.”

By the time Coleman won that race, he’d long since abandoned the radical leanings of his college days. Coleman was still a Democrat, but ran against and beat the more liberal, party-anointed candidate in a city that rarely elected Republicans. He governed from the middle, refusing tax increases and emphasizing government efficiencies and the importance of attracting new businesses.

In 1996, Coleman was Minnesota chairman of Bill Clinton’s reelection campaign. But big change was afoot; just a month after the election, he left the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The following year, he led the successful effort to build a hockey arena and attract an NHL franchise to his city, then went on to be re-elected mayor as a Republican.

In Coleman’s opinion, his defection to the GOP is why Democrats still so enthusiastically label him a political chameleon.

“I think they’re just mad that I left the DFL,” Coleman said. “Seriously. It all goes back to that. I left the DFL, and that is heresy.”

Coleman said he still believes in the core principles he held when he was a Democrat: High taxes stifle economic growth. Limited, effective government is better than big government. Abortion should be illegal, prompted by personal experience after the Colemans had two children die in infancy from a rare genetic disorder.

“His switch came at a time when his philosophy really aligned with where Republicans were going much moreso than where Democrats were going,” said Tom Horner, a public relations executive and former Republican strategist who advised Coleman’s 1998 campaign for governor. “That’s what made it work. They could see it was born of ideology, not opportunism.”

Minnesota Republicans rewarded Coleman’s decision by making him their candidate for governor just a year after he switched parties. He went up against a former mentor and early supporter, the Democratic Attorney General Skip Humphrey. But Coleman’s political star was eclipsed by a phenomenon that no one saw coming: Jesse Ventura.

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After finishing second to Ventura in the governor’s race, Coleman finished his last three years in the mayor’s office. He spent part of the time trying to replicate his hockey success with a bid to build a baseball stadium and lure the Twins from Minneapolis. But voters soundly rejected a sales tax to pay for it.

While he left the mayor’s office at the start of 2002, Coleman never stepped out of the political arena. He first planned another run for governor, until the Bush White House—trying to topple the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate—made it known that he was the administration’s favored candidate to take on Minnesota’s liberal standard-bearer, Paul Wellstone.

Much of the debate in the race turned on Wellstone’s vote against authorizing President Bush to use force against Iraq, with candidate Coleman highly critical of Wellstone’s stance. “I’m not questioning Senator Wellstone’s patriotism. I’m questioning his judgment,” Coleman said at the time.

The race was close as Election Day approached, but turned upside down on Oct. 25, 2002 when Wellstone, his wife and daughter and five others were killed when their plane crashed in northern Minnesota. After a pause in the campaign, Democrats chose former Vice President Walter Mondale to replace Wellstone on the ballot. But the national landscape favored Republicans, a memorial service for Wellstone turned off voters when it turned into a political rally, and Coleman defeated Mondale.

This year, the national landscape favors Democrats. In his current reelection campaign, Coleman has highlighted areas where he’s worked with Democrats and parted ways with the Bush administration. He said attacks against him for being too close to the administration earlier in his term betray an incomplete understanding of the way a U.S. senator is supposed to function.

“We don’t cast a vote in the Senate thinking, are you embracing or not embracing the president?” Coleman said. “I just think that the hatred of the president is so great that anybody who seemed close to the president in any way is the enemy. I don’t measure myself that way.”

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On the campaign trail this year, Coleman’s been talking a lot about his 32 years as a government servant.

“I grew up with an understanding that if you could provide positive leadership in peoples’ lives, that was rewarded,” Coleman said. “More rewarding, to me, than making a buck.”

At the rest home in Marshall, Coleman stands in the middle of the room and bonds with his small audience. He jokes about the weather. He thanks them for their service to the community. He quotes Hubert Humphrey and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He stresses his own lack of great personal wealth, which sets him apart from both Democratic opponent Franken and many of his colleagues in the U.S. Senate. “For me, my life savings are tied into my IRA. That’s it,” Coleman said to the seniors.

In several campaign appearances in southwestern Minnesota, Coleman’s argument for reelection is hard to categorize. He talks of working across the aisle, draining partisanship from the process, pursuing broadly supported goals like making health care more affordable and reducing dependence on foreign oil, and highlights his constituent service.

But he also warns of too much Democratic dominance in Washington, with himself as perhaps the man who could stop Democrats from a filibuster-proof 60 seats. He asks his audiences: “Do you believe General Petraeus has a better plan for Iraq and Afghanistan than Moveon.org and Harry Reid?”

At the last small-town stop on this day, Coleman talks to about two dozen supporters at a coffee shop in Glencoe. There, he explains to his allies the common ground they share.

“We’ve got an election in 15 days,” Coleman said. “If you care about these things, I need you. Because your future is at stake.”

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